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The Department of Automotive and Agricultural Machinery of the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca has been looking for a long time for the possibilities of using alternative fuels. The target vehicle of our investigation, a flexible-fueled vehicle (FFV) has a single fuel tank, fuel system, and engine. Biodiesel and bioethanol are a renewable and environmentally friendly alternative fuels. Our previous researches have pointed out that biodiesel-diesel fuel-ethanol blends can be used in diesel engines with little or no modification. The fuel properties of the blend are very close to those of diesel fuels at low concentrations (up to 20%) of biofuels. For example, the viscosities of the blends are the same as the viscosity of the diesel fuel because the higher viscosity of the biodiesel compensates the lower viscosity of the bioethanol. There has been made the same observation in the case of the density and of the surface tension.

The diesel biodiesel-diesel oil-bioethanol mixture displays real potential uses as an alternative fuel. The idea stands on the fact that a series of properties of the two biofuels complete each other. Therefore, in this study, biodiesel and bioetanol were blended with commercial diesel fuel at 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% and 25% and 30% on a volume basis to characterize the key fuel properties of the blends such as density, viscosity, surface tension, lubricity, flash point and cold filter plugging point. The densities of the diesel oil-biodiesel-bioethanol blends are in the range of 841-852 kg/m3, very close to the diesel fuel requirement related in EN 590. In the case of the investigated blends kinematic viscosity is in the range of 2.176…2.756 mm2/s. The blends flash points that containing 5% ethanol are in the range of 16…18 °C, and which containing 10% ethanol are less than 16 °C. Measured values of surface tensions are in the range of 28.47…34.83 mN/m.